Travel Travails

Almost everyone enjoys travelling. If you are a person with average physical and mental health, chances are you have, at some point of time in life, planned and looked forward to a trip. I am no different, but I am sure you know what people mean when they say that excess of everything is bad (except having an excess of single malts in your private bar bought from the airport duty free shops which is just awesome!).

So I was talking about excessive travelling and how that can be bad for some people. But first, we need to get through the disclaimer: all views and opinions expressed herein are idiosyncratic. You are most welcome to disagree and to have a different take on things. I will be happy to hear your views but please don’t display a compulsive need to prove and convince me of your viewpoint. Opinions are like genitals. It’s perfectly fine to have it and it’s perfectly fine to be proud of it, but please don’t try to ram it down other people’s throats unless they explicitly ask for it. It’s just rude (and unsafe).

This post examines my experience with business travel – the lead up, the trip, and the aftermath. Since I am no Quentin Tarantino or Chris Nolan, I will choose the linear and chronological narrative. It all begins with that one phone call that you get in between your 51^st yawn after your big fat lunch of hot and sour soup, fried rice, and kung pao chicken. You pick up the phone while trying to suppress the yawn that makes you look like a giant hippopotamus, and struggle to get that one word out - “Hello”. You try to sound all energetic as you talk business with the guy at the other end, but in reality you are still wondering why they put so much celery in the kung pao chicken. Somewhere in this cross connection of your mouth talking about revenues and targets, your brain thinking about Chinese food, and your fingers doing the incessant right click-refresh-right click-refresh drill … you have just been bamboozled! You are soon about to find out that you need to pack your bags (again!), waste a weekend in transit (again!), and spend the next few days meeting people you don’t know but have been told to do business with. Oh, and by the way … since you are travelling at such short notice, and being the money-wise manager that you are, you think it is morally incorrect to fly business class, even if you are entitled to do so. Why buy a $7,700 business class ticket to Toronto when an economy class ticket is available at only $900? Right? Congratulations, you have just been bamboozled (again!).

Day’s over and you are walking back to your car thinking about having committed to a trip that you had no plans of undertaking. “It’s all good,” you tell yourself. “It’s a good opportunity for me to learn and I get to see the world on company expense!” you reason. As you drive back you are making a mental note of the things you need to pack. You had planned to buy some groceries and cook tonight but now you think that there’s no point of doing that because you are going to be away for a while. So you stop somewhere and get a tomato basil soup and a pesto chicken sandwich for dinner that you can eat as you stuff your bags. You reach home and chow down the food while watching the bazillionth rerun of Friends (We were on a break, no we weren’t, Hahaha … still so funny!).

As you press your clothes and try to match ties with your shirt, you start getting really bored. You ask your girlfriend or your Mom to Skype and give you company as you stash 8 pairs of undergarments for your weeklong trip (one extra set just to be prepared, you know). Your girlfriend’s starting to get pissed off about how much you have been away lately and is secretly wondering if you are just making up these trips to be away from her (mental note – bring back a souvenir for her). Your Mom wants to know is if you have packed everything and she doesn’t forget to remind you to pack your gloves and scarf (though she does forget that she has already reminded you of that before – twice).

Next day, you rush through the important stuff at work before you head to the airport. In between the last minute meetings and phone calls, you also have to find time to set your out-of-office email response, complete your online check in, withdrawn cash from the ATM, and book a taxi to drive you to Airport Terminal E. Once at the airport you stand in line to go through security while hoping that this time your brown ass won’t be singled out for the ‘randomly selected’ checks. While everyone walks through a metallic door frame you are asked to step into a booth with your hands over your head as some x-ray device swings around to make sure you don’t have any explosives or cocaine stuffed up your bum. Yes, brown is the new black. Those guys are finally off the hook (about time, too!).

A pretzel and a tazo tea make the wait for the flight more tolerable. You sit and wonder when you will have enough miles to get a zone 1 boarding so that you are not one of the last people to enter the aircraft and for a change, there is some space for your suitcase in the overhead lockers. As you board the plane you hope that your adjacent seat be occupied by a hot female or just be empty, but no … that’s not going to happen. God likes to have fun, and you are His HBO. You realize you are sitting next to a woman who is neither hot nor believes in deodorants, and as if that wasn’t enough she also has a bawling baby. Just perfect! God’s just whipped up some pop corn and he’s now sitting in His La-Z-Boy and is watching you squirm and twitch all the way from Houston to Toronto. And, by the way, congratulations ... you have just been bamboozled!

Toronto’s cold and you look for your gloves and scarf. Damn! You forgot to pack it even after multiple reminders from your mother. Never mind, I will buy them from a nearby store you tell yourself (not going to happen!). The Downtown Radisson welcomes you with their well rehearsed artificial smiles and greetings, which gets a little more warm and artificial when you tell them your rewards membership number. They offer you a slight upgrade and tell you that you are going to get a complimentary bottle of 2002 Gabbiano Chianti in your room. After a thoroughly uneventful day, you are so pathetic that free wine cheers you up to the extent that you feel all is well with the world. You order food up to your room, make some calls to let people know that you have reached, and finally hit the bed to begin work the next day.

What happens over the next few days is a blur of 3 course buffet breakfasts, meetings, 3 course gourmet lunches, factory visits, PowerPoint presentations, 3 course dinners, and finally the all important post dinner socializing at the bar (that also eventually ends up as a business discussion with slurred speech). By the time you are done for the day, you have consumed close to 3,500 calories while having been just as physically active as a doorknob. Everyday is the same story. You start waiting with bated breath for the moment you take your flight back home.

Eventually, you are back. On your way back from the airport you stop in the way to pick up some dinner and make a mental note to go grocery shopping the next day. Back in office you spend half the day telling your colleagues how you trip went. Then lazily you head back to your desk to answer all those emails that you saw on your BlackBerry but didn’t bother opening because they came with 5MB attachments. Once you are done with that, you come to a very important but annoying part of the process – filing your expenses. Invariably you will realize that you safely preserved the $30 lunch receipt from the Kowloon Dim Sum Restaurant but have lost the $110 dinner receipt from Bistro 990. All in a day’s play, you tell yourself.

Halfway through filing your expenses, your colleagues stop by your office to know if you want to join them for lunch. An hour later, you have warm soup belly and as you stumble back into your office, your speaker phone crackles to life with the voice of the receptionist. “Hi Sunny! Mr. Morrison from Glasgow left you a message while you were gone for lunch. Could you please call him up to discuss your forthcoming Glasgow trip?” Congratulations, you have just been bamboozled!

Grocery shopping will have to wait.